Most UK businesses need a managed account on a shared machine. That is the answer for most of the people who ring us about this, and it saves a lot of money that would otherwise go on hardware doing nothing. The interesting part is working out when you are the exception.
One thing to clear up first, because it trips almost everyone up. Shared, VPS and dedicated describe where your website lives. Managed describes who does the work. Two separate questions, and the industry presents them as one ladder. You can have a shared account that is looked after beautifully, and a dedicated server that nobody has logged into since the day it was built.
Three questions that settle it
Who fixes it at 8am on a bank holiday?
Answer this before anything technical. If the answer is “nobody here”, you want managed, and the machine type barely matters. If the answer is a systems administrator on your payroll who would rather have root access than a support number, unmanaged options open up and they are considerably cheaper.
How hard does your site work the server?
A brochure site serving cached pages barely touches the processor. A shop calculating baskets and delivery rates for a hundred people at once is a different animal, as is anything running long jobs in the background. Traffic numbers matter less than what each visit makes the server do.
Does anyone else get to be on the machine?
For nearly everybody, yes, and it is fine. For a handful of businesses it is a hard no, usually because a client contract or a compliance officer says the data cannot sit on hardware other companies also use. That one requirement takes you straight to a dedicated machine regardless of how small the site is.
Shared hosting
Your website lives on a server with other websites, sharing the processor, memory and disk between them. This is what the vast majority of small business sites run on and there is nothing wrong with it.
The right site for it is one that gets read rather than worked: opening times, a bit about the company, a portfolio, a contact form, and traffic that behaves much the same from one week to the next. The genuine risk is the neighbours: on a badly run server, one compromised or greedy site drags everyone down with it. What protects you is proper isolation between accounts, sensible limits, and somebody watching the machine. Those are qualities of the host, not of the word “shared”.
Our managed hosting starts here, at £1 a day + VAT for a site and its email.
Virtual private servers
A VPS gives you a guaranteed slice of a machine with its own operating system. Your resources are ringfenced, so the neighbours cannot eat them, and you can install more or less what you like.
Good reasons to want one: software with unusual requirements, an application that is not a website at all, a staging environment that has to mirror production, or a developer who needs command line access to do the job properly.
The trap is buying an unmanaged one to solve a speed problem. This one comes up constantly. A site is sluggish, somebody suggests a bigger server, and six weeks later the business owns a virtual machine nobody is patching and the site is still sluggish, because the slowness was never about resources. The checks that would have caught that are in our guide to why a WordPress site is slow, and not one of them costs anything. Kernel updates, firewall rules and mail configuration all become your job the moment you take root.
Dedicated servers
One whole machine, nobody else on it. Every bit of processor and memory belongs to your workload, and when performance dips there is only one place to look.
Whole machines are easier to want than to justify. The test is whether one server works out cheaper or simpler than the alternative, and for most businesses it is neither: you end up renting hardware that idles all night so that it can cope at eleven in the morning. Where it flips is when the alternative has got complicated. Thirty separate accounts to keep patched is worse than one machine. A job that runs flat out for hours has no business sitting next to anybody else’s website. And a contract saying your data cannot share hardware settles it before anyone looks at the traffic figures at all.
Ours are built in UK data centres and fully managed, with GPU hardware available where a project justifies it. There is more detail on the dedicated servers page, including why we quote each machine individually.
Signs you have outgrown what you are on
Businesses rarely get a clean signal that it is time to move. What they get is a set of small irritations that they slowly accept as normal: the public pages are quick while the admin area crawls, because caching hides the front end and leaves the back end exposed; the control panel keeps showing resource limits being hit and you have learned to look past the warning; checkout times out at your busiest hour and recovers when things go quiet; your host has emailed you about CPU usage more than once.
Two are worth more attention than the rest. Every time you are mentioned somewhere, the site wobbles at exactly the moment it should be selling. You have accumulated more websites than you can name from memory. The first is costing you sales on your best days. The second means there is no single list anywhere of what you are responsible for keeping online.
Two or three of those together usually means the setup no longer fits the business. One on its own often means something on the site needs fixing instead, which is a cheaper conversation.
You do not have to get this right first time
People agonise over this decision as though it were structural. It is not. Moving between tiers is ordinary work that we do constantly, and there is a walk-through of the mechanics in how to move a WordPress site to a new host if you want to see what it involves. We have taken several of a customer’s servers and folded them into one machine, and we have taken one machine and pulled it apart across several. The sites came across without their owners having to do anything.
Start with what fits today. Pick a host who will tell you when it stops fitting, rather than one who waits for you to notice on a Friday afternoon.
Choosing hosting FAQs
Is managed hosting the same as shared hosting?
No, and they are not alternatives. Shared tells you where the site lives, which is a machine with other sites on it. Managed tells you who does the updates, backups, monitoring and fixing. An account can be both at once, and most of ours is. Cheap plans tend to be shared and unmanaged, which is where problems start.
Do I need a VPS if my website is slow?
Usually not. Most slow sites are slow because of the site: oversized images, too many plugins, a bloated database, or a page builder doing far more work than the design needs. A bigger server raises a ceiling the site was never touching, so the bill goes up and the stopwatch barely moves. Work out the cause first, then buy hardware if you still need it.
Is shared hosting safe for a business website?
On a well-run server, yes. The worry people have is a neighbouring site being compromised and spreading, which is why isolation between accounts, patching at server level and daily off-site backups matter far more than the word on the plan. On an overcrowded budget server with none of that in place, the worry is fair.
When should a business move to a dedicated server?
When you look after enough websites that one machine beats a pile of accounts, when a shop is busy enough that slow checkouts cost real money, when a workload runs flat out for hours, or when your data cannot legally share hardware with anyone else. If none of those describe you, a managed account will do the job for less.
Describe it to us and we will tell you
Ten minutes on the phone beats a fortnight of comparison tables. Tell us what the site does, how busy it gets and who looks after it now, and we will say which of these you actually need. Sometimes the answer is that you already have it.
Leave a Reply